Gould unsure if election watchdog would catch disputed story on Privy Council clerk

Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould says she doesn’t known if the Trudeau government’s new election protection unit would respond to a widely disputed story on Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick that has been shared thousands of times on social media, including by a Conservative MP.

“I don’t want to pre-judge what the panel would or wouldn’t comment on,” she told reporters on Tuesday.

Earlier this year, Gould announced the establishment of a new panel — the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol — responsible for informing candidates, organizations and the public about attacks aimed at influencing the upcoming federal election. The panel is made up of five senior public servants.

A story on Wernick widely characterized as false running on the largely unknown Buffalo Chronicle website was shared more than 1,800 times on Facebook and tweeted or otherwise shared on Twitter hundreds of times, as of Wednesday morning. Conservative MP Larry Miller retweeted a tweet containing the post earlier this week before later un-tweeting it.

Miller told iPolitics his staff removed the tweet as soon as they discovered it was “fake.”

When asked about how the panel would respond to these sorts of articles, Gould said the threshold would be “very high” and it would only react if it is “something that they felt would impede the ability to have free and fair elections.”

The Buffalo Chronicle largely resembles a news site, though many journalists and commentators have flagged multiple issues as casting doubts about its legitimacy.

For example, one red flag noted by journalists is that the article on Wernick does not have a byline. iPolitics has chosen not to specifically repeat what the Buffalo Chronicle wrote about the Privy Council clerk to avoid spreading misinformation.

Calls made by iPolitics to the phone number listed on the website reached a voicemail of someone who identifies themselves as Matt Ricchiazzi. A search of the site shows that Matt Ricchiazzi last wrote for the Buffalo Chronicle almost two years ago. The listed phone number has a Buffalo, N.Y., area code.

Asked for comment on the article, a spokesperson from the Prime Minister’s Office would only say that the office “does not comment on false information” and is “concerned with disinformation online.”

The government’s election protection panel will be made up of Wernick, the country’s national security and intelligence advisor, the deputy minister of justice and deputy attorney general, the deputy minister of public safety, and the deputy minister of Global Affairs Canada. They will assess incidents and determine if they pass a certain “threshold” that could impact the credibility of an election.

Gould told MPs on the House ethics committee on Tuesday that she didn’t want to “pre-judge” how the panel would respond to incidents of fake news but pointed to international incidents as offering helpful precedents.

“I think it’s safe to assume that some of the major incidents that we’ve seen around the world, for example the Macron Leaks or what the U.S. was grappling with at the time, would be of sufficient value to inform Canadians,” she said. Gould joined the committee to brief them on how the government plans to protect the next election.

If the panel determines that it should make a public statement, it will focus on how it was made aware of the attack, what it know about the incident and how Canadians should ensure they’re protected and well informed, according to Gould, who cautioned that the panel’s purpose is not to “referee” the election.

According to the minister, the election protection panel will deal strictly with foreign threats. Elections Canada is tasked with ensuring its own protocols are followed in Canada.

“It is also the role of the media to look into these things and to inform Canadians as to whether information is coming from trusted sources or not,” Gould said.

Neither Conservative MP Bob Zimmer or NDP MP Charlie Angus had said they had heard of the Buffalo Chronicle when asked on Tuesday.

Angus told reporters he thinks there needs to be more of a focus on defending the election against domestic threats.

“Maybe there are some foreign actors but the real threat is this disinformation, the manipulation of the algorithms to bring more and more extremist content into the Facebook feed, the fact that we see people presenting false stories that have been relentless moved around, that can have incredibly devastating impacts during an election – but it’s domestic, it’s local, it’s on the Facebook platform. I don’t see that this body that they’ve set up is going to address that,” Angus said.

Zimmer was concerned about whether the election protection panel should be able to report an incident in a case similar to the article by the Buffalo Chronicle on Wernick, since it was about one of the panel’s members and would be a “conflict of interest.

“I think it’s too close to home,” Zimmer said.

“I think it wouldn’t look good and it shouldn’t be done that way. So then who would, I guess is the question.”